What will drive tomorrow's economy?

Here is my dilemma:

Today's economic engine is fired by stuff. It is the production, manufacturing, and distribution of stuff that keeps our marketplace humming. That is what this economic downturn is reminding us. When we stop buying, the economy starts tanking. But to buy more stuff degrades the environment. More stuff equals more mining, more manufacturing, more housing, more land development, more stores, more driving, more shopping, more throwing away, more waste.

To save the economy, then, we have to buy more stuff. To buy more stuff, though, is to harm our world.

Which forces the question: How do we break this cycle? If we wish to save the environment, ourselves, and our finances, what will drive tomorrow's economy?

There seem to be two possible solutions: (1) either we should make stuff more-efficiently, ie, more sustainably; or (2) we should build an economy not based on stuff. Or both.

Few of us want to envision a future built on "less." We live in a world that imagines that more is more, more is better. Almost everyone, from the most developed lands to the least 'emerging markets,' want more. And how can we say no to that? It would be both mean-spirited and fruitless for us Americans, who are but 5% of the world's population and yet consume 25% of the world's resources, to tell others they cannot aspire to the quality of life that we live here.

In this vision, then, if world consumption grew to match US consumption, we would need multiple earths to meet that demand. Since we don't carry around extra earths in our pockets, we will have to think of something else.

One suggestion is to make more stuff than we do now in better ways. Efficiency and recycling, cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, is one suggested solution. In this view, we dare to imagine that no matter how many of us there are, and no matter how big our appetites, if we can devise cyclical, sustainable, waste-free ways of manufacturing and consuming, all will be well. Done right, there will be enough money and resources for all.

I do not doubt that efficiency is a critical and necessary piece of the puzzle. Doing more with less is almost always advisable. And we know it is achievable to some extent. Years ago, California instituted energy efficiency procedures. In response, over the past 30 years, its energy consumption per capita has plateaued, remaining flat at just under 8,000 kwh per person, while the US average per capita usage has soared to 12,000 kwh. At the same time, California's average per capita GDP has surpassed the US average. (source: California Energy Commission; via Congressman Bartlett's power point).

And yet the question remains: is this sufficient?

First, there is the challenge by some that GDP is not an appropriate measure of a country's health, indeed that a country's quality of life can be sinking even as the economic indicators are rising . (For more information on this, and the alternative measure of GPI, check out Redefining Progress at www.rprogress.org. I will write more on this in another entry.) To be fair, the cradle-to-cradle view leans more to GPI than GDP. Still, is that enough?

Second, no matter how efficiently we live, no matter how creatively we stretch the natural laws of the earth's carrying capacity, we will eventually bump up against its limits, and be constrained by them.

And third, even if there were no natural limits to expansion and growth, are there not spiritual limits? Don't we need to ask at some point: Are we there yet? Isn't this enough? One quick example: over the last 30 years, America's average house doubled in size. Doubled. What was acceptable and sufficient, and perhaps even comfortable thirty years ago, is small and tight and unacceptable today. Yet today's households - the number of people living in these houses - are smaller. One report says: "As household size has decreased, the floor area per capita has increased by more than a factor of 3, from 286 square feet per capita in 1950 to 847 square feet per capita in 2000."

Of course, this trend may be temporarily reversing itself during this recession, as family and friends move in with family and friends. But that may be just the point: larger houses, representing our overall bloated consumer habits, didn't make us happier. In fact, one could argue that because we pursued more than we needed, we ended up with less than we had. And as the AIG bonus fiasco has shown us, those at the very top of the mess have developed a tin ear to the ethics of money. Do we really want people running our economy who only or mostly think of money and short-term profit, regardless of risk, rectitude, righteousness or social justice?

According to some happiness or satisfaction surveys, even before this recent economic downturn, Americans were no happier than we were decades ago (and perhaps a little less so). Nor are we the most satisfied nation on the planet.

Spiritually, then, even if we could have ever more, without cease, is that what we would want? Is that what would make us happy? Is that what our purpose in life is?

Once we pass a threshold of comfort, health and viability, how much do we need? At what point do we say, enough?

Which takes us back to our question: what will fire the enginen of our economy if not stuff?
Can we build another model?

Can it be driven by the services we provide one another: teaching, nursing, protecting, research, companionship, repairing, fixing, developing, curing, entertaining, transporting, etc. instead of making unnecessary stuff?

It is reported that Americans spend $2.6 billion on wrapping paper a year. What if we put our gifts in reusable bags (saving both the earth and our money) and instead, took the savings and with it, renovated our schools, and created community gardens, retrofitted old factories into green manufacturers, and increased and improved our social work, police and home aide work force?

Stuff will continue to be made to the extent that all these services, and our needs, require it. But wouldn't it be better if we didn't make stuff just so we can make a living but rather made a living with a minimum of unnecessary stuff. A quote in the Baltimore Sun business section on Tuesday, March 17, page 10, talking about the hard times an up-scale clothing store is going through, reads: "You have to try and encourage a 'wants'-based shopper in America and give people a reason to go out and make that purchase."

Is that really what we want to do? Waste our money on things we don't need so it can go to who-knows-where, instead of using that same money to do all the things we as a society say we need to do but can't afford? At what price is such a "want-based" society? What does it cost us in children who go to bed hungry, families without support systems and an environment that continues to degrade?

What would a healthy society, and a healthy economy, not based on wants and stuff really look like? I would love to know the answer.

We need to see this recession as a game-changer. It is not just something we need to get through so we can return to the good old days. We need to use this crisis to see the underlying ills that brought it on and build a new, renewable, economic model, to heal the earth, protect our bodies and enrich our souls.

Then, all the pain we are all going through will have been worth it.

extended producer responsibility

The way things work today is this:

A manufacturer creates and markets a product.

When things are working right, the manufacturer is responsible for the waste that comes out of the factory, either through chimneys or sludge or pipes.

But the manufacturer is likely not to be held responsible for much of what happens before and all of what happens after that:

where the packaging goes; how the product is disposed of; the environmental harm or costs of disposal of their products; or the proper education of the seller or consumer regarding the future handling and disposal of the product.

Instead, local governments pick up the tab for disposal; hazardous waste management; green clean up; public education. Without financial incentives or implications for the design and proper disposal of their products, it is no wonder that the manufacturing industry is slow to green their ways.

Enter Extended Producer Responsibility.

Here is the way it is explained on the Waste to Wealth website:

"Extended producer responsibility (EPR), based on the "polluter pays" principle, entails making manufacturers responsible for the entire lifecycle of the products and packaging they produce. One aim of EPR policies is to internalize the environmental costs of products into their price. Another is to shift the economic burden of managing products that have reached the end of their useful life from local government and taxpayers to product producers and consumers.

The concept of EPR was first formally introduced in Sweden by Thomas Lindhqvist in a 1990 report to the Swedish Ministry of the Environment."

This is the way of the future. Researchers, material scientists, producers, manufacturers even distributors all need to be part of the solution of sustainability. Everyone along the economic food chain is responsible for the environmental impact of the products that they design, manufacture, and sell. That way, real costs can be embedded in the product costs, and consumers will do their part in buying, and disposing of things, responsibly as well.

Check out this short and enlightening explanation of EPR:

http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/epr/index.html

Own Alone

The news today tells us that circulation is up in Maryland libraries. Instead of buying books, going to movies, renting videos, or otherwise spending money on alternative leisure time activities, people are returning to the old-fashioned, tried-and-true free resources of their local libraries.

The simple experience of walking into our library offers a glimpse of successful community-sharing we rarely notice and hardly ever celebrate. This is a place we all can come for pleasure, growth, leisure, company. Even more, there is a physical bond that it establishes between us. The books that I check out today might have been in your lap yesterday. The book I hold today may be toted about in your bag next month. I for one bemoan the loss of the Due Date sheet in the back of the book. It told me a bit of the history of the travels of the book, but even more, a bit of the interests of my community. I felt closer to my neighbors back in those days.

But this reminded me of something more I learned this past week that astonished me. In Europe, or so I am told, people do not own their hot water heaters. They only lease them. After all, it was explained to me, people don't really want hot water heaters. They want hot water. Yet to buy a hot water heater, which is the only way to get hot water here in the states, means a ten year investment, locking out the benefits of advances in technology and energy efficiency that develops over those ten years. No one is invested in the upkeep (companies even make money in the repairs) and no one cares where the broken, old heater goes after its useful life. No wonder we have such a waste-rich economy.

In Europe, the company owns the hot water heater, is responsible for its upkeep, is incentivized to have them be the most efficient (or the customer will rent from a competitor), and is responsible for taking them back and properly disposing of them, or better, recycling much of them, at the end of their usable life.

Indeed, why do we need to own things we don't want just to get the stuff they produce? What if we could buy the use of things to get the results we want without the burden of ownership, inefficiency, upkeep and waste?

This is a new way of thinking for most of us, and a new model for building sustainable businesses. We do this in some sectors of the marketplace: we lease cars, we rent homes. But what if we expanded that thinking. On the one hand, there should always be free libraries for all the books and films and things we want to read or see or use but don't need or want to own. But what if, for example, when we wanted to own a book, we could download the text of the book to an electronic book and have the book without having its "stuff". Amazon's Kindle works on this principle. The books you purchase for download come right to your hands via your Kindle, but also sit in your Amazon account for reading from any monitor or computer. And nothing of substance changes hands but zeroes and ones (and a bit of money).

Now I will be the first to tell you all the limitations of Kindle, so I am not urging you to go out and buy it. But they are on the right track. As are the outfits that run Zip-cars, the car-sharing company; bike-share groups; handbag swaps; clothing swaps; free-cycle, neighborhood groups that offer for free usable stuff we no longer want; etc.

This new approach of de-coupling the benefits of something from the (permanent) ownership of something promises to emerge as a key player in our reconstructed economy. It will be more affordable, more sustainable, and more efficient. And it will build stronge, caring, mutually-responsible ties among the various members of the community. We just need to open our minds, change our way of thinking, and reconnect .

environmental lessons from economic collapse

Everyone agrees that our economic crisis is in large measure anthropogenic, that is, due to human behavior, living larger than we could afford, taking more than we could return, wanting more than is either reasonable or fair to expect. That is, we loaned more than was just so we could reap more than we sowed; borrowed more than we could replenish with what we can earn; divvied up, spread out, and pawned off the responsibility so that no one truly could be blamed, or could even have been moved to care.

Now we are paying the price.

And the price is very steep. It was forced on us by these regrettable circumstances. But I can't help imagining for a moment, what if, way before the crisis, independent of any impending crisis, say two years ago, we had taken $350 billion dollars and spread it around to invent 98% efficient solar energy conversion panels, electric cars and the infrastructure to support them, fixed all our bridges, roads, schools; built amazing inter- and intra-city public transit; increased teacher salaries; improved our social services to our nation's most needy. How much good - economic, environmental and social - would that have done?

Nope. Too expensive. So instead we lost billions in the stock market, and are spending billions more to bail out a profligate market with uncertain returns.

Now, translate all these lessons into the environmental problem. It too is anthropogenic, human-made. Here too we are living larger than we can afford, taking more than we can return, dipping into the principle when we should be living off the interest, forgetting that the atmosphere and sea are finite and not endlessly able to absorb our waste.

Scholars, analysts, prophets tell us we do not make radical changes unless faced with crises. But here is the bright side. Perhaps in this one instance, we can use the lessons of the financial crisis to motivate us to respond to an impending yet still avoidable environmental crisis. For the truth is, we will one day soon recover from this economic crisis, hopefully even in the next year or two. But we cannot and will not speedily recover from the crash of the environment, not in our lifetime, or the lifetime of our children, not even in this century.

These dual crises we face are not only similar in their structure, but gratefully and blessedly also in their solutions. By using green technology to fuel economic health; producing goods in a cyclical, no waste, cradle-to-cradle style; living wisely - consuming only what we can appropriately replenish - we can build an enduring, sustainable economy and environment; tending more to service - being with, educating, doing for and tending to each other - can build an economy pegged to human welfare and not collection of stuff.

Erich Fromm and Abraham Joshua Heschel among thousands of others have taught it: our culture needs to change from a predominant mode of stuff and "having" to a predominate mode of relationship and "being." That is good for what is called the triple bottom-line: people, planet, and profit. One integrated solution for one just, healthy, good world.

Bidding 5768 goodbye

The difficulties we are experiencing at the end of this year are certainly making it a pleasure to bid it goodbye. The financial markets worldwide, led by the United States mortgage fiasco, are teetering and fragile. Unemployment is up. Consumer confidence is down. Ethical behavior is in tatters. Basic rights guaranteed under the constitution of the United States are sliced away in the guise of security and our own best interest. How could the Treasury Secretary even imagine, even as a bargaining ploy, to dare ask for the exclusive, non-reviewable, non-challengeable, non-supervised right to single-handedly manage and distribute $700 billion?

And we just learned that despite all our efforts at stabilizing our atmospheric greenhouse gases, they rose 3% this past year, almost all increases coming from the developing world. China - now the largest contributor to greenhouse gases - is responsible for 60% of this 3% increase. The good news is that we in the "developed world" are holding our emissions steady - and soon might be able to see them decline. Just this past week Maryland and nine other eastern states held their first Regional Greenhouse Gas carbon auction, which will both limits CO2 emissions and create funds for alternative energy research.

So while things are looking rough we cannot throw up our hands. Just as China is beginning to crack down on manufacturing abuses that are killing their children, sooner or later China will begin to crack down on the pollution that is killing the world's environment. And when they do, we should be ready with technologies that can help them. Then, we will be the grand exporters and China the importers. We will turn the economic tables. Green industry, research and technology can re-establish America at the head of the technological revolution and enable us to become the green industry leaders. But we must invest well, fully and wisely.

This is not the time to be timid.

We created the money to prosecute a fabricated war; and to bail out a banking industry that could have avoided this whole fiasco if it just did not seek usurious rates from greed-driven mortgages.

We might not think we have any money left over for grand, Manhattan Project like efforts to green our industries, but surely if we do not invest in efficiency technologies, in new renewable forms of energy, we will within ten years be spending billions of dollars we also do not have to take care of people displaced by - and repair their homes damaged in - increasingly angry storms, spend more money on a gallon of clean water than a gallon of gasoline when local water systems are polluted and unhealthy, heat and cool our homes with over-priced energy that continues to degrade the environment.

The environmental picture is not looking much better despite all our efforts. But we cannot stop - rather must work harder. How do we do that and not give in to despair? What keeps us going?

No doubt we each have our own answer. In no small measure it is the company we keep, the comforting and encouraging presence of those who care just as much as we. And just like the star thrower - who threw back all the starfish he could, even thought there were many more he could not - we do what we can, hoping that cumulatively someday it will all add up to something big. No doubt someday it will.

And some of us keep going for the pure joy we get from less, from a life of increased simplicity. From buying less, and wasting less, and disturbing the world less. Surprisingly, the less gives me so much more - a greater appreciation of all, an awareness of worlds in littler things and individual acts. Being green isn't just good; it is fundamentally, life-alteringly, fulfilling.

My very best wishes to you all for a healthy, sweet, green new year, filled with its full share of blessings that will heal this fractured world of ours.

Shana tova

No There There

Thursdays are magic days. We usually call them trash days, but they often feel like magic. Thursday mornings, my neighbors and I dutifully, and gratefully, shlep our trashcans, full of decaying, odorous debris with seven days’ worth of personal waste, to the bottom of our driveways. We leave it there, and walk away. Poof, when we return, that trash has disappeared.

Our world is once again clean, clear, and more to the nose. Out of sight, out of mind. Gone. Away. And so, in our world of magical thinking, all is good.

That is what we used to think. But today we know this to be wrong. We know now that what goes around, comes around. There is no “away”. There is no there there. No place on earth is unaffected by the detritus and debris that we create through the consumption of our lives. It is reported that the Alaskan Inuit have the world’s highest levels of DDT and PDBs in their bodies – though they live thousands of miles from the sources.

Many of us have begun to respond. We try to limit our waste. We recycle everything from plastic bags to banana peels. And yet, as conscientious as we may be, we still have garbage bags every week to set out on the corner. Commercial packaging is part of the problem. Non-recyclable plastics is another. I suppose unnecessary purchases is a third. And while we can control the last, we cannot personally control the first two. Which is why living an environmentally friendly, or sustainable, life, is not something we can achieve only by our personal behavior. We need to move the movers, the makers, the manufacturers, merchants and money-lenders. We need to promote and support legislation that requires reduced waste and proper disposal.


Anthony Cortese, a former Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and now president of Second Nature (www.secondnature.org), tells us that as Americans, we “consume the equivalent of our body weight in solid materials daily, over 94% of which goes to waste before we ever see the product or service. It takes about 2000 pounds of material, most of which went to waste, to make a laptop computer.”

The stuff that we personally consume represents only a small portion of the overall waste we are responsible for.

What to do about it? Yes, keep recycling, reducing, reusing. Keep learning and encouraging others to do the same. And, just as much, when you do go shopping, make your purchases make a statement. Buy products from manufacturers who work to reduce the waste stream they create from production, to packaging, to transportation to disposal.

Watch this fun 20 minute video to learn about moving from a linear, unsustainable production model to a cyclical, sustainable production model. The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com).

Then before you make your next purchase, check out the most environmentally friendly products available. For more information on a world of green products, visit www.coopamerica.org. Get their Green Pages. Let your purchases help change the world.

19.7 cubic feet

Try as I might, I could not muster the time or energy to blog over Passover. Much like our ancestors, my experience of the holiday began with the food preparations and consumed me until now.

Thursday before the holiday was devoted to purchasing food stuffs, which often felt more like hunting and scavenging. I went from store to store to find all that I needed for the three day opening onslaught (Shabbat and the first two days, including the two seders). My seemingly, out-of-character, apparently indulgent - not to mention expensive - food shopping spree so alarmed my credit card company that they froze my card temporarily, not for lack of funds but for suspicious activity.

Thursday night was devoted to the final marathon cleaning, putting hametz dishes away and bringing down the passover ware.

Friday was devoted to cooking. And more cooking.

Friday night, we were off and running.

Between exhaustion, guests, work and the incessant cycle of cooking/cleaning/cooking/cleaning, there was little time to blog. For the reality of a home that that is the hub of Passover is that for a whole week, every morsel of food that we eat has to be prepared from scratch, by hand in one's kitchen that very week (unless you are really good and either transform your kitchen weeks earlier or have the indulgent luxury of a separate kitchen. Or I supposed you could hire someone to cook for you, but now we trespass in the territory of make-believe.) No eating out, no buying prepared food, no dipping into the freezer for food you cooked weeks earlier for such an occasion. The constancy of the kitchen, for those of us who ordinarily spend as little time as possible there, is humbling.

But that is not the point of this blog. Just an explanation for the blog blackout period.

The point of the blog is this: a month before Passover, I disconnected our second refrigerator/freezer. It has become de rigueur in the burbs to have two, sometimes three, refrigerators and freezers. But that appliance is one of the greediest power eaters in our homes. A 20 cubic feet refrigerator/freezer (roughly the one I have and most likely you too) uses 2700 KW a year. That annual usage is exceeded in most typical homes only by the water heater and air conditioner. (For a fascinating glimpse at typical home appliance consumption rates, go to http://www.oksolar.com/technical/consumption.html)

We too have two r/fs. And that was perhaps, maybe, somewhat defensible when my children were smaller and thus the household larger. But today, there are three of us in this large home. So a month before Passover, I determined, by fiat, that we were going to reduce our cold food storage to what we could fit into one unit, our 19.7 cubic foot refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen. It took us a while to eat down our stock. We buy less at a time now, but amazingly don't find we are going to the store more often. We just have less stashed away at any one time. And the bright side is that our freezer food is fresher, not having stayed in the cold recesses of climate-controlled cave for months, courtesy of abundant frozen space.

But I write about this now because for Passover, I needed to return to two fully functioning units. What with feeding 20 people at a seder and 6-8 at most subsequent meals. So now once again, after stocking up my two units, I need to cull and trim and get back into one unit. Despite my previous wrestling with this storage space diet, 19.7 cubic feet still looks so very small. And yet I realize that is probably larger than most home refrigeration units in most of the world. The whole closet - for that is what it is, just cold - is almost as big as a twin bed. And we are back to three people in my household. So why do I need more space; and why does my refrigerator feel so small? What grand level of luxury and abundance has become the norm in our lives so that I feel like I am now shoving my life's food stock into a handbag? Maybe I should line the back wall with mylar or mirrors to make it feel twice as big?

Old habits of abundance, even excess, are hard to break. But I am now off to consolidate, bringing the residue of holiday foods from the second r/f into the neighborhood of the kitchen r/f. It almost feels like crossing the railroad tracks; merging two classes, two cultures. I hope everybody plays nicely in the dark.

the story behind the things we buy

If you are looking for a quick way to learn more about the way things are made, and discarded, like cosmetics, plastic bags, chocolate, how they affect the environment and what we can do to lower our waste and increase our health, check out Good Stuff? - A Behind-the-Scenes Guide to the Things We Buy.
(http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/44)

Published by the World Watch Organization, it is a free download-able booklet which devotes one page to each of its 24 categories.

Quick and easy to read, it satisfies the first flush of curiosity about the things in our everyday life that we often don't give enough thought to.

World Water Day

Today is Purim, a day of celebratory abandonment, when we read a raucous and bawdy book about the Jewish people's triumph over hatred and external threats, eat and drink a bit too much, and otherwise act as if we hadn't a care in the world. We all deserve one day a year to slough off the burdens and worries life places upon us.

But Purim ends tonight, as Shabbat blessedly begins, and reality returns. Coinciding with Shabbat this year is World Water Day. At the urging of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the UN designated March 22 as the annual day "to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide." Over a billion people worldwide lack adequate, safe drinking water. And the numbers are likely to grow as climate change threatens annual rainfall patterns and the rapid melting of glaciers robs many areas of a slower, steady seasonal water supply.

This week, click on www.worldwaterday.net to learn more about the problem, what is being done and what you can do. And check out www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org. This group is spearheading a return to drinking local instead of relying on bottled water (40% of which is tap water anyway!). Bottled water is not the solution for several reasons: the manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of these bottles harms the environment, and wastes valuable resources, including good money that could be spent elsewhere.

Think Outside the Bottle website tells us that: Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Never mind the billions of dollars spent unnecessarily which could better go to purchase or support things and services of real value.

And read about the increasing privatization of erstwhile public water supplies to meet the water demands of private water bottling companies.

Learn more about what you can do to do limit the use of the bottle, and to make it healthier. Many companies, businesses, buildings, organizations and schools are going bottle-free. Increasingly, conferences and hotels are going bottle-free. Thinkoutsidethebottle has a pledge you can take. Check it out.

You can still carry water around in your own reusable containers - just make sure it is the right kind of plastic (not the kind that leach unhealthy chemicals) or better, metal. More and more manufacturers are making attractive metal liquid containers that we can refill, wash and use again instead of disposable, one-use, throw-away containers. (And even if they can be recycled, reuse is higher on the sustainability scale than recycling, which still requires lots of additional resources to collect, transport, re-make and send back out into the consumer stream.) It can make a great gift to that someone who has everything.

But, meanwhile, today is still Purim. So while the sun shines, celebrate hilariously.

Shabbat shalom

the price of gold

Here is an astonishing bit of information - culled from today's Baltimore Sun: in open pit gold mining operations, 76 tons of waste and debris are produced to retrieve 1 ounce of gold. One ounce for every 76 tons. The mind almost cannot compute that obscene ratio, especially when 80% of all the gold mined in the United States is used for jewelry! That is why some of the top flight stores are opposing such practices.